“I know.”
“You will feel better when you are there. They will make you well soon.”
The sick woman’s eyes closed and remained closed for perhaps thirty seconds and then opened again.
“I will not get well,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter. I only want to be comfortable, so that I can die peacefully.”
“You mustn’t say things like that, Mother,” Donna said. “We are sending you to get well, and that’s what you must do.”
But she did not, of course. She died as she had said, and as she wished.
In her apartment, about three o’clock in the morning, Donna received the news from the hospital.
2.
It was a dull, wet day. In the night it had rained, and it had rained also early in the morning. Then it had not rained again, though it had threatened constantly to resume, and the sky was a dirty smear. The wind was northwesterly, still cold. Beside the dark hole that had been opened in the earth, the mound of dirt had been covered with white canvas, but at the edges it spilled out thinly, like a brown stain, on grass that was beginning to show the merest sign of green. In a bush of bridal wreath beside a grave, a scarlet bird of some kind sat and cocked its head.
The minister went through the ritual of consignment. His voice was high, nasal, threaded with a thin sound of petulance, as if he were scolding Death as a trespasser, but the petulance was surely only part of the quality of his voice. It was all depressing, and all unnecessary. Everything was finished, everything had been done and said, and all this — the words and gestures and symbolism — was no more than an ugly superfluity that were better omitted. Since it had not been omitted, however, it would at least be only decent, Donna thought, to complete it quickly and without excessive pretension. Life had been rejected, it was as simple as that; and it was now ill-mannered of Life, to say the least, to cling tenaciously to one who had wanted to go, comfortably and peacefully, to hold her now in the dull gray threat of rain and subject her in the end to the last grim measure of prescribed ritual.
Standing beside Donna, Wayne Buchanan began to sob. The sound of his sobbing was shallow and shocking, rattling in his throat like phlegm. All through the ceremony earlier, and during the slow ride to this depressing place, he had sat silent and decorous. She had thought that she would at least be spared a maudlin demonstration (which was more than she had hoped for to start with), but now it seemed that she was not even to be spared this and she must bear after all, in addition to everything else, this intolerable abasement.
How disgusting! she thought. How absolutely obscene!
She closed her eyes and bowed her head and waited, and after a while it was over. In the back seat of the black car in which they had come, she sat beside her father, who was now quiet, and returned to her father’s house. It was not really necessary for her to go there — she might have gone on to her own place or to the shop or wherever she chose — but she wanted to go for a particular reason. The reason was that she might walk through the house one last time without obligations or bonds or anything at all to keep her or claim her or bring her back again when she was gone. It would be, in its own way, her own ritual.
In front of the house, she got out of the car and went inside and directly upstairs. She walked through the rooms slowly, staying in each one until she felt impelled to move on, trying in each, by making herself very quiet and receptive, to recover the quality it had possessed in the short-lived period of happiness when she was very young, wanting sincerely in the final moments of the final departure to remember these rooms as kindly as she possibly could. The sewing room she saved to the end. Mrs. Kullen was there when she arrived, and remained when she went. Caught in her corset, fixed in light, she survived all others and would never leave.
In the hall below, Wayne Buchanan was standing at the door and looking out through the small glass pane to the street. He turned when she came up behind him. His face was livid and loose on its bones, and he was at that moment, though she didn’t know it, more afraid and alone than he had ever been.
“Are you going?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m going.”
“Will you come back to see me when you can?”
“No. I hope that I never see you again.”
“But... but why?”
“You are not my father and have never been. You are only the man who helped to beget me.”
“How can you say such things?”
“Since they are true, they are not difficult to say. Perhaps it is difficult to hear and accept, but that’s your problem.”
“I have always tried to do my best for my family.”
“Do you actually confess that you could have done no better? Anyhow, it does not matter, because it’s a damn lie, and you know it very well. You have been mean and petty and cruel, and you have never tried honestly to do a truly generous thing. I was sick of you long ago, and I am sick of you now, but I am willing to do you the courtesy of forgetting you entirely if you will do the same for me.” He stepped aside abruptly and opened the door.
3.
Because she wanted to restore at once the pattern of life which had been interrupted by her mother’s death, she went to the shop. She arrived just before closing time and went through the salon to her workroom. There, she threw herself into a chair and stretched her legs out long in front of her, arching her back, and feeling in calves and thighs the pleasant tension of muscles. She felt liberated, cut loose, in a way exonerated. She did not have any idea of precisely what she had been exonerated of, but she was conscious, nevertheless, of the lifting of an obscure indictment. Corollary with the liberation was a sense of being caught in a quickening current, a conviction that something of significance was going to happen to her, and that the thing to happen would be good. Reacting physically to the spur of her thoughts, she felt in her flesh a kind of tingling resiliency, and she was impelled to laugh aloud.
After a while, Gussie Ingram knocked and entered without waiting for a response. She slouched in a chair and lit one of her interminable cigarettes.
“Well,” she said, “how did it go?”
“Miserably. I’m immensely relieved that it’s over.”
“I hope you don’t mind because I wasn’t there. I simply cannot endure a funeral.”
“Of course not. It would have been completely unnecessary.”
“What will your father do now?”
“I don’t know. He’ll get along, I suppose.”
“I was wondering if perhaps you’d move in with him, now that he’s alone.”
“No. I wouldn’t even consider it. My father and I are not compatible.”
“Oh? Well, neither were me and mine, so far as that goes. What in God’s name is it that makes fathers so frequently impossible?”
“Maybe they aren’t. Maybe ours were exceptions. Anyhow, I am feeling too good at present to spoil it by talking of unpleasant things. Do you think it wrong of me to feel good under the circumstances?”
“I have long ago abandoned judging what is wrong or not wrong, darling.”
“Well, I was just sitting here feeling free and rather excited. Rather like I used to feel the last day of school when I was a child. As a matter of fact, I have a peculiar notion that something good is about to happen. Do you believe it is possible to have valid premonitions?”
“Oh, God, darling, don’t ask me.”
“Wasn’t it Huxley who defined metaphysics as the art of befuddling oneself methodically?”
“I wouldn’t know about that, either. Huxley and I are as incompatible as my old man and I were, but for different reasons.”